The Voyage of the Dumb

Our kids can't navigate reality -- and that's on us

In difficult times we can always count on the hard left to deliver light relief.

Their most recent sketch was last week’s Global March to Gaza. Activists from reportedly 80 countries arrived in Egypt with the intention of walking to its border with the Strip to protest Israel’s restrictions on aid, even though Israel is trying to safeguard the distribution of aid through a new mechanism designed to stop Hamas from hijacking aid meant for civilians — but I’m splitting hairs now.

Alas, Cairo didn’t much like the brave humanitarians of the March to Gaza. Because the last thing the Egyptian regime wants is a ragtag army of idiots and Islamists compromising a border it’s fortified during the past 20 months lest the suffering Gazans try to do as does every other imperilled population in war and flee to a neighbouring country. Because the Egyptian regime despises Hamas, an offshoot of its enemy, the Muslim Brotherhood, and guards against the infiltration of Hamas influence from Gaza and has a limited reservoir of sympathy for Palestinians generally, and for Gazans in particular, although this dimension of the tragedy of Gaza is of zero interest to the Western media and look, here I go again veering into complexity.

A tattooed white lefty was filmed pleading with Egyptian riot police to allow the March, “for love, for humanity, for Islam!” The Egyptian authorities, with help from Egyptian civilians, whacked the protestors on the head, forcefully detained and dispersed them, and gave them their marching orders out of the country.

The March to Gaza was planned in co-ordination with the attempted breach of Israel’s naval blockade of the territory, a stunt with Greta Thunberg in the lead. I wrote about the latter in the piece below, first published in The Weekend Australian.

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Greta Thunberg was right to defy Israeli authorities in the wake of their seizing the Gaza-bound Madleen by refusing to watch Hamas’s footage from the October 7 massacre, “the worst 45-minute film you will ever see” according to a headline in Time Magazine.

The unredacted scenes of jubilant mutilation, beheading and mass murder, the young lives cut down at a dance party, the entire families butchered in their homes, would have been too tough for her to bear.

For someone who believes the Jewish state is a malign, racist aggressor in the current war, and indeed in all of them, the genocidal Hamas production – one man famously brags down the phone to his parents, “I killed 10 Jews!” – naturally unsettles the schema, which of course is why Israel’s Foreign Ministry invites sceptics to watch it.

But for Thunberg and the quasi-robotic “pro-Palestinian” movement that has anointed her as a figurehead, cognitive dissonance must be stamped out by all means necessary. Hence, anti-Israel hardliners who watch the film claim the video is not that bad after all – The Guardian columnist Owen Jones distinguished himself by pointing out, with a hint of disappointment, that there were no explicit scenes of rape – or it’s a fake.

In Thunberg’s case I suspect the film would have inflicted a profound psychic injury. For this fragility, I blame the parents. Not just Thunberg’s parents, who, to be fair, faced challenges that broke the manual. I blame the societal institutions from which the adults fled the room, letting a teenage Thunberg and her followers lead the debate on issues from climate to the Middle East.

Now we inhabit a politics of more heat than light in which blind stupidity is cast as virtue and bad actors steer our course.

From the start Thunberg was conditioned to expect the world to capitulate to her maximalist world view. Her parents have said that initially they adopted climate-conscious habits such as forgoing meat for the sole purpose of rousing their daughter from her apocalyptic gloom. Her mother gave up her opera career because it had involved air travel. Having bent her parents to her will, Thunberg turned to her school. It was a pushover, and education systems around the globe proved equally pliable. In 2018 she alone protested against climate change at the school gates: the following year four million students were marching out of their classrooms.

Look, the spectacle of young people desperate to safeguard the future of the planet they’ll inherit moved me. What to do, though, once the School Strike for Palestine came along, claiming to be the successor cause to climate change for right-thinking young people? The education leaders and ministers who weren’t already down with the kids on this one faced the uncomfortable prospect of pushing back against a tsunami of one-sided anti-Israel messaging on TikTok. It’s a hard ask once you’ve already surrendered the high ground of institutional neutrality and sober, evidence-based debate.

As for Thunberg, we can hardly blame her for having a messiah complex when the world hailed her as a messiah. She herself joked that she could hardly complain about not being heard: “I’m being heard all the time.”

She was heard, politely, by everyone from the UN climate summit where she famously shrieked “How dare you!”, to the pope. The BBC made her guest editor of its flagship current affairs program and ever since its default tone has been set to adolescent outrage. In her cover photo for Time’s 2019 Person of the Year issue she is framed against the horizon, waves crashing alongside her, visage ethereal.

The vicious personalised attacks on her from some on the political right only reinforced the sense that she was at the moral centre of the universe. It’s undeniable she helped force climate change on to the political agenda. While the intensity of that debate has eased, a saint on the high seas can’t retire at 21. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

The Israeli ground assault on Gaza was still a week away on October 20 when Thunberg declared solidarity with Palestinians. If back then her mind was closed to the complex dilemma Israel faced in fighting an enemy sworn to its destruction with a war strategy based on the martyrdom of its own civilians, it won’t was unlikely to be prized open now given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza.

Still, watching the saga of her voyage of the not-really-damned, it occurred to me that the Israeli authorities – usually a PR disaster waiting to happen – might have been her first encounter with gentle but firm boundaries.

Deported back to Sweden on an El-Al flight, she looked bereft, seated in an empty row, flight-shamed before all the world. I found myself wishing someone could at least give her a teddy bear.

At her press conference at the Paris airport, her disorientation was painful to watch. Her bid, alongside 11 others, to break Israel’s longstanding naval blockade of Hamas-run Gaza and deliver a symbolic shipment of humanitarian aid to suffering Palestinians did not pan out as intended. Thunberg nonetheless clung to the script; bad enough she had to speak at all because she conserves energy on that front.

She and her comrades from the Madleen, she said, were kidnapped by the Israeli military – a horrific description given more than 20 living hostages kidnapped from Israel on October 7 remain in the dungeons of Gaza. And not a truthful description because despite the protesters’ self-aggrandising videos filmed in anticipation of being lengthily detained, the Israelis were forcing their swift departure back to where they came from.

Asked how she and the crew were treated after the Israelis intercepted their vessel and took them into police custody, she said it was dehumanising. She refused to elaborate on what this meant. The rest of us saw the opposite – Israeli soldiers handing out snacks on the boat – except for Turkey, which described the episode as a “heinous attack”.

Asked why so many governments around the world were ignoring what was happening in Gaza, she blathered about a global system that put “short-term economic profit” and “maximising geopolitical power” over the “wellbeing of humans and the planet”. I’m not sure what “short-term economic profit” she was referring to; the Israeli economy is under severe strain.

To the extent the remark might conjure anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about rich Jews orchestrating world events, I’m prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt. Not so the pro-Hamas agitators in whose fetid waters she swims. Her bottom line on the alleged global indifference to Gaza? “Racism, that’s the simple answer.” And she accused the Israelis of trying to make them watch “propaganda videos”.

She means the October 7 footage: filmed proudly by Hamas in which young people, many of them, no doubt, idealistic disciples of Thunberg, were brutally slaughtered – their dreams and childhoods “stolen”, to quote her own phrase from her climate change crusade – in an orgy of murderous racism.

In my unguarded moments I fantasise about the impact Thunberg might have had if she’d redirected even a drop of her oceanic rage against Israel to pushing global leaders to insist on the unconditional release of the hostages and the immediate surrender of Hamas. Who knows?

Had she watched the October 7 video in the aftermath of her nautical adventure she might, just might, have had an inkling that she’s the one in a propaganda video and, as always, the star.